eHomeUpgrade links to an interesting report from research agency, Parks Associates. The research indicates over the next few years that there will be pretty major growth in the provision of online back-up services from ISPs (although with projected revenues of just $188 million by 2012, we’re not talking mainstream here).
There’s a really interesting question here - with local storage (i.e. hard disks) becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day, and the expected explosion shortly in server farms which will be able to save all of our data in the cloud, in the next couple of years, we’re likely to be overwhelmed with choice when it comes to where and with who we want to protect our data.
But who would you trust to protect your data?
So I guess, right now, we’re all trusting Microsoft to ensure our data is protected safely on our home servers - we know that with a bugs and hiccups in their v1 product, they’re not infallible, and they’re one of the world’s largest corporations. Do you think Google would do a better job? Or Yahoo?
How about your PC/Server manufacturer? HP have recently launched HP Upline, which too is having a few snags post-launch - would they do a better job of protecting your data? Could you see Dell, Acer, Levono doing the same?
At the other end of the spectrum, you have small players such as JungleDisk (who utilise Amazon’s server farms and S3 framework) and KeepVault, both of who have online backup add-ins which work straight from within the Windows Home Server Console - really neat functionality, but do their brands give you sufficient security?
Who knows, in the future, a whole heap of brands may jump in and either offer standalone, or repackaged backup services - how would a Walmart Cloud Storage product suit you? Would you trust a bank, say Citibank to look after your data? They look after you’re money, so why not your memories? How about Virgin - would you hand over all the photos of your kids growing up to Richard B?
Or actually, are you just happy enough having a backup at home via your home server?
From a personal point of view, I think you can never have too many backups. Home Server does a cracking job, but I’ll be definitely taking advantage of someone’s online backup when it becomes fast, cheap and trustworthy enough to use. One thing’s for sure, though, my ISP (British Telecom in this case) is absolutely the last organisation I’d trust with my data. Swamped by bureaucracy, charging high costs for variable service, “fair usage” policies that hobble my use of their so called “unlimited” internet package and they can’t even get me a decent uPnP router that can be auto-configured correctly. Nope, I’ll be spending my money elsewhere, thanks very much.
What about you?
May 13th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I am with you on the final comment that you cannot have enough backups and with the amount of digital assets we now have at home (photos, video, music etc etc) requiring more storage than many businesses required even a few years ago it is becoming a bigger issue. The challenge as always is how to make backups so easy that it just happens and when the reality is that many businesses with their resources and IT skills don’t do it, what hope the “geek free” home. WHS is clearly a great start, although it is still a reasonable investment, requires some IT knowledge and as you point out has some teething features!!
Cloud storage (or whatever other name you wish to call it) will take off within the next 12-18 months (IMHO) and may be the answer, however I am not sure that it will be the ISP’s who will be the primary providers and revenues of $188 by 2012 will be a red herring in terms of measuring success.
Amazon (S3), Microsoft (various e.g. Mesh, Skydrive) and Google are all offering or planning big cloud storage plays, with typically some free to get you going and then a small chargeable element for additional capacity. Although the “free capacity” is too low to backup all your assets it is increasing all the time e.g. in August 2007 Skydrive was offering 500MB free, today it is 5GB and I am sure it is going one way only. The investment that these players are making in data centre capacity is colossal and I believe it is these true global players, rather than any local ISP who will really drive the agenda.
The ISP’s have an opportunity to take a slice of this pie, however I am not convinced it will be the direct storage piece (unless they are reselling one of the big boys toys), but rather in working out how to have a sensible utilisation charge for bandwidth. Unfortunately this is not going to be popular with the current home user on an unlimited plan. (BT’s discussions with HP to sell it’s UK data centres, talk to this)
And going full circle to Windows Home Server, it leaves the door open for the development community to provide “it just works” utilities for WHS that integrate to one of the major players cloud storage engines, where the local software is free and the developer takes a “margin” on the charges for the storage service (sounds like a Software plus Services story to me !!!).
Final thought is that this could all become a non issue anyway in the coming months if Microsoft includes WHS in the evolving Mesh story.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I am going to use online backup. I think that at the price point of a KeepVault type of service it seems like a no-brainer. Biggest issue I have right now is the transfer speed for backups. I have about 10GB of pics and music, and this could take days to upload … dragging down performance the whole time, I imagine.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Nice article with some good points. As someone who works in the “cloud storage” space, there has certainly been downward pressure on the pricing, with free or nearly free backup providers popping up every day, maybe even every hour. It may sound counter-intuitive to the current thrust of the market, but what money there is to be made in this space is at the high end. In other words, if you are considering entering this space, you may want to plan to charge for your service and maybe even charge a premium. And as some have noted, that nothing is free (not even this advice apparently
I would encourage any one interested in this space to check out our partner program on our website at http://www. netmass. com
May 15th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I think a hybrid solution is the best; I am backing up my laptop to my home server which in its turn backs up to my online backup provider.
The problem with making online backups directly from a laptop is that it is not on all the time and when it is on you do not want to backup because it clogs up your internet connection.
That is why I make regular backups to my home server, which even via wifi only takes about 10 minutes. My server is then set up to only make the online backup during the night (when I am not using the internet with my laptop). I think the initial backup of my data took about a week, which was fine in my case but I can’t see how one could do that from a laptop.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hi ICT Blog - who do you use as your on-line backup provider? I was wondering if all the usual suspects (Carbonite etc) were compatable (certified) with WHS…